Wireless Community Area Networks (CANs) have been developed to provide access to the internet for wirelessly-enabled users. A CAN is a network with a size lying between a Wireless Local Area Network (LAN) and a Wide Area Network (WAN). Thus a CAN may provide network access to users distributed over, say, a 1 km2 area, such as a town centre or a university campus. A schematic diagram of a CAN is shown in FIG. 1.
The link 14 from the CAN to the user 12 often uses a cheap and widely-available wireless standard, such as IEEE 802.11 set of protocols, often referred to for simplicity as ‘WiFi’.
Current CAN implementations, such as those installed at some US university campuses (for example Carnegie Mellon University), use off-the-shelf WiFi Access Points (APs) 10, connected to each other and to the broadband backbone 16 (and ultimately the internet) across a set of links 18 which is termed a ‘Distribution System’ (DS). This DS ‘backhaul’ link usually uses a wired interface, most commonly based on IEEE 802.3 or ‘Ethernet’.
A wired DS is desirable from the point of view that it offers a reliable high-bandwidth/low latency path for onward transmission of data. However, the problem with this wired approach is that wires of communications quality need to be provided to each AP, and interconnected via wired switches/hubs/routers etc. In some environments, such as company or university campuses, this wired infrastructure may already be in place. However, in other environments the installation and maintenance of this wired backhaul infrastructure could be prohibitively expensive.